Month: March 2014

A little sharing when I joined centrifugal pump commissioning in MGT-4,Tarakan Field, Pertamina EP Aset 5.

So, first question: What is commissioning? Commissioning is an activity to know how appropriate an equipment actual operating condition with the specification we want.

Then, here we goes…

MGT is a stand for Mangatal, a production area of Tarakan Field.

To get in to MGT-4, it takes about 30-45 minutes from our office, and we have to pass this cowboy road.

A sand truck got its tires slip.

Our car was going to pass the same way, and fortunately, Mas Adit is a reliable engineer driver. Whoa!

Our location is quite near to residents, but there’s no fence nor warning signs. Everybody can easily access our production location, and worse, our way is the moist sand land and a lot of sand miners dig the sand and bring them by truck.

Again, there’s no assertive regulation from the government (also our company) about land boundaries and also about natural resources exploitation (beside oil and gas). I don’t know about those sand miners business detail, but they bring a lot of sand everyday. Mas Tomi (Production Group Leader) said that, the road was not this bad when he came here 2 years ago. Our access road into the production area become lower and more inappropriate to pass.

And here is when I observed the commissioning activity.

Left-rigth: Mas Anton (RAM-electrical), Mas Adit (Production), Me

Let pictures tell the stories:

Dessert and canyon.

The first time I came here, I’ve got a question: Is the location save enough for an operation area?Especially when rainfall and the soil is too moist and easily cave in.

So, before we turned on the pump, we checked the fluid level (in this case: crude oil). This fluid level has to be above the NPSH requirement (the value was got from pump design simulation) to prevent cavitation. Cavitation is an event when gas formed by the liquid itself because of the affection of pressure that’s inappropriate by design. If there’s any cavitation happened in pump, rotating pump will sound noisy and could be damaged if operated in a long time. Pump is designed to transfer liquid phase only.

Crude oil tank. Fluid level was pointed by the small lumber.

And also, we set:

– Flexim.It’s an instrument to check fluid capacity that pass the pipeline.

– Pressure gauge.

– Operating frequency of the elmot (electrical motor)

– Valve percentage opened

Flexim

The electrical panel to set the frequency desired.

Then, we operated the pump. We checked the RPM, discharge pressure, and per 5 minutes, we check the fluid capacity via Flexim.After 15 minutes, we evaluated our observation, and broke a decision.

Was the pump operating condition appropriate with the specification we want? In this case, we accepted the operating condition and we were going to use the pump as soon as possible.

After we completed the commissioning activity, we went back to Tarakan.

In our way to Tarakan, Mas Tomi invited us enjoying Friday afternoon by snacking somay and batagor. Why not? Haha.